


Walz

by Out_Of_Custody



Category: Naruto
Genre: 500 words, AU, Adding tags and characters as I go, Charcter study, F/M, Ishi no Kuni, Major character dead, Minor Character Death, Post-war countries, Relationship Study, Road Trip, Scars, Slow Burn, Small fight, Sunagakure | Hidden Sand Village, Tsuchi no Kuni, body issues, drabble chapters, long ass sentences, quiet apologies, very slow burn
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-05-01
Updated: 2020-01-03
Packaged: 2020-02-10 19:34:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 10
Words: 5,007
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18666964
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Out_Of_Custody/pseuds/Out_Of_Custody
Summary: They're both still entry-level-somethings when they meet but she has this crazy idea and he can't help but think that it might work out.





	1. A sort of Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> Fair warning: I'll be updating sporadically - mostly because this is a work still actually in the making, so please be prepared for longer periods of time in-between chapters. That said, the chapters, too, only really have a length of 500 words each, because I want them to and because it's, kind of, a challenge for me to pack intel into a shorter frame of length. Also: this is a fanfic. It's not perfect and it's... wildly off-canon but, so is the pairing. I hope you can enjoy this :)

+++

 

They're both still entry-level-somethings when they meet; her twenty-six with a natural hair-colour that disqualifies her from most professions she would like to honestly pursue and him thirty-two with similar troubles and too profound of a moral code to resort to making use of his familial ties (just yesterday he's listened to his cousin moan about a new co-worker in her cyber-insurance department who had majored in _geography_ – he does not want to be in either shoes).

Which is why, when he meets her at a small party of a mutual friend and they somehow manage to actually talk to each other – he can count on one hand the occasions on which such thing has happened to him, on a _party_ no less – he is intrigued. She is clever and sharp with a wit that bites if you're careless enough to let it (later, he learns just how soft she really is, when she allows the barbed-wire-traps around her to lower long enough to allow a glimpse at the real her; even much later he learns to give her reasons to keep the barbs to a mirthfully harmless minimum that keeps him on his toes at best).

And she has a plan.

Because if all her years of hard-work for that _MD_ before her name are not going to pay off in a regular stint, then she is going to pave her own way – not, lastly, because she has loans to pay off – and she's going to do it by going against everything she's ever been taught.

_How do you feel about a road-trip?_

As a touted genius himself who has, by now, managed to accrue Mastership in Sociology and Pharmacology, and a Bachelor in Civil Engineering and Water Management with the according Master in the making and no real job to speak of, he feels like, maybe, it is time to do something crazy and unprecedented. Given that his old man has recently elected to push daisies – and hopefully meet his wife and two sons – and left behind a considerable sum to divide among his two remaining scions, he sits on quite the inheritance that he doesn't know what to do with.

So he listens to her plans, looks at her maps and routes, reads through her proposals and hypotheses, her outlines and her goals. She is _out-there_ , somewhere – groundbreaking because he researches and realizes that, until now, people simply haven't thought of exchanging knowledge the way she thinks of doing. Trading Fire Country's knowledge of growing herbs in green-houses or the secret of irrigation where there is no water to be had for Suna's art of prosthetics. Trading their own antidotes for a few of Kusa's poisons.

The idea itches under his skin every time they meet over the duration of a semester, before he wraps up his loose ties and meagre belongings and knocks on the door of the VW she calls home.

_I'm here for that road trip, if the offer is still on the table._

 

 


	2. Kawa No Kuni

+++

 

So her bus is a tiny disaster on four wheels. She thinks that, maybe, it’s a bit of a metaphor for the relationship she has somehow managed to establish with this beautifully abstract male who has decided to take her up on her hare-brained scheme and flow with it.

She still doesn’t quite know how she managed to rope him into actual conversation on that party – _or_ garner his honest interest.

Not even halfway through Kawa no Kuni and its endless rivers – and destroyed bridges that force them to take the scenic route more often than they would have preferred – does she lose half of her oil gauge and finds out, at the next petrol station, that the man she travels with is actually _the_ Tobirama Senju.

She feels stupid, and not just a bit, but during the day which they have to wait for the old man owning the station to finagle a deal with the even older hoarder-mechanic down the road who does, indeed, have a gauge that would fit the model of her van, she learns that, had it been up to him, she wouldn’t have known until Suna (later, she learns that his hiding is a modus operandi he has taken up in an attempt to avoid the lime-light his father had preferred; much later she realizes that he, too, doesn’t know how to deal with a surplus of attention that he has not chosen to invite onto himself).

In the three months before he’d knocked on her van’s door to stow his backpack away with her possessions and settle down in the seat next to hers with a map on his knees, she’s come to enjoy the quickness of his tongue, the speed of his thoughts and his mind – especially his mind, when it takes all those beautiful twists and turns to connect dots where there had not been dots before – and she’ll admit that he’s rather easy on the eye.

But there had been a natural distance between them that she is not surprised to see her bus eradicate.

For one her bed is only so big, and the cool nights do not stop their bodies from moving closer in their sleep. She learns the natural perfume of his body, and she learns how quickly he takes to her Sun Salutations. She learns that he doesn’t sleep all that well in the near-vicinity of another human-being, and she learns that he will eat fish raw if he can. She learns what he looks like when his eyes get tired and the glasses come out, and she learns what he looks like through the hazy smoke of his cigarettes. She learns the curve of his smile when Tanigakure’s homeless children chase his fish away in their playful abandon.

And maybe her bus is a wreck but she realizes that, when he joins her on the roof of the van to listen to stones cracking in the chill of the desert night, so is her heart.

 

 


	3. Sunagakure no Sato I

 

+++

 

How they make it to Sunagakure no Sato is a miracle he would not quite believe himself if he hadn't been there to witness it. Her van is a mess. Frankly though when they traverse the borders of the hidden city, so are they: the heat makes her pink hair heavy and the scarf she has to wrap around her head to blend in with the locale does not seem conductive to staving off the warmth either, his own skin blisters and burns before they have even reached the borders and she has taken to reminding him to slather himself in… ointment (he does not think that the _goo_ she pushes at him could pass as sunscreen even in an alternate reality) to stave off worse after-effects. On the up-side, his recently developed habit of wrapping himself in all and any available tissues makes him blend in stupendously.

The heat of the day and the cold of the night almost kills them in the first month during which they stubbornly camp out in and around the van while attempting to find a way to the people they want to talk to. Both is hard work and it’s not until she stubbornly mends the broken bones and torn flesh of a group of children whose dog happened to stumble over an old land-mine that the village cautiously opens their arms to them.

In the mostly tender care of the women, she picks up Sunian within a week and he comes to envy her polyglottism when she proves to be fluent in _Fusha_ among others. He learns, once more, that children are preferable to grown-ups in any and all scenarios and realizes along the way how dearly he misses both Kawarama and Itama (it does and doesn’t surprise him to learn how bitter he is, still, about the war that has shaken the countries until recently and the many innocent lives it has taken).

It’s not until the elder of the village comes to meet them, two months in, that he realizes that his companion, too, has old wounds of war – scars that will not heal, no matter how long the scab has come and gone. The children herald her as Chiyo-baa-sama and Sakura goes whiter than the sun can give her reason to.

She’s too young, he thinks later, when she has drunk herself into a stupor she is going to regret come morning, to have had any part in that war – she could not possibly have been more than a child when Sasori no Akasuna died. _T_ _hen again_ , he thinks, cradling her closer towards him (only because of the cold night), _neither had either of his brothers been_.

Chiyo-baa-sama gives them the opportunity to meet Gaara no Sabaku and his siblings over an informal dinner, war-torn and haggard themselves (and sometimes he thinks: _there cannot be a God in this world_ ) and Sakura takes it and runs her mouth as if she’d been born without a filter. They like her.

 

 


	4. Sunagakure no Sato II

 

+++

 

She has not forgotten. Not really. And given the scar on her body she also does not think that she will be able to forget – but... she has gotten good about pushing certain memories to a... room in her mind.

It's a utilitarian room with white walls and a tar-black floor that her boots always scuff against whenever she first enters. She doesn't need to look down at herself to know that her mind has put her back into the black habit she's been given when she had been twelve. She knows all the mat-boxes in it by heart, knows what demons they contain.

One of them springs open the night Chiyo-baa-sama visits (it doesn't close as easily as the first time around).

Tobirama, bless his beautiful, red-eyed soul, doesn't ask. Considering his genius it's likely he doesn't _need_ to in order to come to the correct answer and it occurs to her that she hasn't thought enough about the fact that he, too, learns her the longer they travel around in the van. She wonders, on the first night after Chiyo's visit when she doesn't reach for the bottle, what she looks like to him but ushers the thought into another room ( _for now_ , it growls at her and she doesn't know if she likes the implications).

He does the calculations for the miniature green-house they receive permission to set up in one of the abandoned ORs in the lower levels of Suna's hospital and loses himself in them; in the measures he needs to take to secure the room against going up in flames too quickly in case of emergency, in the steps it takes to make certain the room can survive even when the hospital's water supply is cut off for a month (not an irregular occurrence in summer months, she is told). He dives deep without looking left or right and she curses the tender squeeze of admiration her heart stumbles over every time she gets a glimpse of his frazzled but focussed person. It's a focus she knows well, has grown up with and when he snaps at her to put the food she brings him _Anywhere else_ _but the_ _fucking_ _blueprint_ despite the fact that _T_ _here is no_ _fucking_ _space,_ _Senju_ she feels almost nostalgic.

Right up to the point where she gets to forcibly, but gently (mostly), incapacitate him and lug his unconscious ass to the van so he can catch up on some much needed rest – she almost smiles when she peels the sticky mess of mummification-tissues off his over-heated body and stubbornly thinks of anything else but the last time she's been this close to an underdressed man ( _h_ _e's asleep for go_ _o_ _dness sakes, Sakura, you are_ _not_ _this desp_ _e_ _rate_ ). She promptly erases all thoughts of him being male and firmly puts him into the 'patient' box (this will tie her over exactly until the moment he wakes up and she finds out that she's so so so so so so _screwed_ ).

 

 


	5. Sunagakure no Sato III

 

+++

 

They feed on grub from the hospital cantina and considering the amount that is going down his oesophagus, his blood probably switches out for the hot machine-sludge that the nurses call coffee half-way through the actual construction of their “green-house”.

Medical staff greets them by first name after they have survived the culinary hell that is Friday, on which the buffet offers a choice between a sweet dish or fish.

And he misses fish because they’re _in the middle of the fucking desert, Senju_ but he learns, after that first Friday, to endure because no feeling of nostalgia should have such power over his intestines.

Sakura proves to have the most hard-headed habit of drinking tea no matter the temperatures of her surrounding environment and although he, himself, develops quite a fondness for the strong blend of mint that Suna’s vendors and shops provide, she stands stubborn, but true, to the atrocity that is her imported ginger-lemon-infusions.

There is something about the way she clings to what he assumes is familiarity that rings a bell but he is not one to pry needlessly.

He learns, instead, just how handy she is with machinated tools despite the fact that her shorter stature makes it comparatively harder on her shoulders – than his – to work over-heads for an extended period of time. She is a ridiculous power-house when it comes to lugging their materials though and it almost puts him to shame before she benches Kankuro on a curious dare from Temari and he figures that, at the very least, his socially constructed male ego could never feel as emasculated as Kankuro’s in that moment (weirdly enough, that does make it better).

That the Kazekage’s siblings would deign to foster such close relations to the two of them – when they cannot be more obviously outsiders, despite the fact that Sakura’s face bronzes enviably (he remains oscillating between the extremes of sunburnt-red or translucent-white) – is curious in itself, but a mystery that is solved around a shared bottle of fermented cactus-juice that burns his insides out and a photograph of a blond that passes along with it.

Everyone has heard of Naruto Uzumaki and his daring dreams of a shared, utopian future; of his daunting, but ultimately suicidal, travels to the hidden villages around the world in a bid to create this future.

Hashirama has been – is still – a most fervent disciple of the forever-youth. Gaara no Sabaku seems a close second.

Sakura is eerily quiet throughout the entire evening as Gaara recounts his impressive rescue at the hands of “The Demon Fox” and his almost inhumane-sounding companions. And Tobirama admits to his curiosity, because little is known about the three shadows who had been delegated with keeping the youth alive on the Fire Lord’s most shameful sham of a diplomatic mission to date.

Even Gaara, however, has to shrug his questions off, because _they kept to the background; not a single flash of skin among them_. Sakura doesn’t speak.

Later, she doesn’t sleep.

 

 


	6. Sunagakure no Sato IV

 

+++

 

Four months after their arrival in Sunagakure no Sato, her milky complexion has given way to a hard-earned, honeyed bronze where she has dared to bare skin that, while it in no way rivals Kankuro’s tan, proves efficient enough in keeping her from burning up under the airy garments that Temari teaches her to wear like a local.

Tobirama wraps himself up in his finely layered tissues like a glorified mummy, but her ointments have become more reliable; recipe improved by a paper with unfamiliar writing that must _somehow_ have slipped into her notes (and would you look at that, Suna’s market has all the ingredients she needs to strengthen her original formula) and at the very least he insists that it is something to be thankful for.

On the nights when he cannot find sleep, he busies himself with the mine-detectors that have been left over from the war and even when he bends over his notes and calculations and blueprints during the day, he will fiddle with the detectors for weeks and weeks on end. Until the “green-house” is completed and she can drown herself in the work of actually rearing live _plants_ and only hears the stories of his planting red flags whenever the detector goes off.

Sunagakure’s retired military forces heave a heavy sigh of reluctance and growl their disapproval at the interference of a stranger – and, technically, former political enemy – before they concede to sending their Mine Detecting Squadrons. She has never seen a Pouched Rat in the line of duty, but Tobirama assures her that they look like quite the force to be reckoned with when streaming out over the sandy terrain like a plague at but the sharp whistle of their keepers.

Nevertheless she takes up mock-sentry the next day – if only to see it for herself (it is not surprising to realize that he has been right; it is a morbidly magnificent sight).

Five months in, the “green-house” thrives and she has taken to educate a hand-full of dedicated street-brats to the proper treatment of the new greens alongside a selected, singular medic from the hospital itself. The medic is young and promising, untouched by the hardness of war and, Sakura thinks, quite perfect to work both with the plants and the urchins she plucks mostly at will. Almost instinctively she knows what plants to water how often and how much and within another month, the green-house runs itself.

Chiyo-baa-sama’s second visit to The Van proves less nerve-wracking than her first, although Sakura might take those words back had she known that Gaara would keep his part of the deal by sending her their most accomplished medic – and more so: prosthetic limb maker – when it is none other than the crone herself (Sakura has come to accept the fact that this particular demon and mat-box have moved from a Triage 3 to a Triage 1; this is not to say that she knows what to _do_ with that kind of knowledge… yet).

 

 


	7. Sunagakure no Sato V

+++

 

He has almost forgotten what a wreck the van is until they start to clean it up again, preparing it for their travels onwards when Chiyo-baa-sama forwards the sum total of her notes and studies to Sakura when she saves Kankuro from certain death by poison. Incidentally it's nothing the old woman has seen before and when Temari and Gaara catch the culprit Tobirama bitterly reminds himself that war is never entirely over.

The Kazekage has to show them out if he doesn't want a military mutiny on his hands, but he does not make for the intelligence that either Sakura or Tobirama have gathered during their stay in his village and sees them off with as much pomp and amiability as possibly affordable. When Hashirama later asks for clarification on their apparently hasty departure from the village, he lets him know without a doubt that Gaara would see them back in his home-town as soon as he has stabilised it to his content.

What he keeps to himself is the quiet smile Sakura had given the young man when he’d promised no further bloodshed between Konoha and Suna before she’d extended the pointer and middle fingers of her left hand, curling the rest inwards, and offered her hand in such a way. There is something about the motion that surprised Gaara – _pleasantly_ – because he reacted favourably and similarly: extending his own left in the same fashion, allowing their fingers to hook. _Promise of a lifetime_ , his friend had said quietly and there’d only been a soft hum from the Sunian.

He _has noticed,_ mind you, the increasingly obvious mystery about Sakura in the recent months – her reaction to Chiyo-baa-sama long before the woman had become a mentor, her fluency in _Fusha_ and the painstaking silence concerning Naruto Uzumaki (when the boy must have been in her age-bracket in a time when schooling was still rather precarious around Konoha – he would say, almost for certain, that they _must_ have crossed paths at one point). But he is still not one to pry and he has his fair share of demons – _Itama, Kawarama, Izuna_ – and despite the fact that they have set out as complete strangers… he has come to know this woman.

What he’d thought he’d seen of her stubborn will in her desire to make her own way if none other was going to be granted to her, had only been the tip of an iceberg that had her working through nights to solve a cross-contamination-problem within her own green-house. He has learned the care she takes to hide her skin even when the necessity is absent. He has learned of her stash of tea-infusions with the most worrying names. He has learned about the close shear of her hair on the back of her head, halfway up the cranium, hidden by her otherwise long locks if left to its own devices. He has learned about the callouses on her fingers that have no place on a medic’s hands.

 

 


	8. Ishi no Kuni

+++

 

She doesn't exactly learn about them, so much as he catches a fever just as they pass the borders of Ishi no Kuni.

Maybe he is lucky that, for the most part of their travels through the land, he is out like a light because Ishi is a war-zone even now.

Or rather: Ishi is the left-over ruin of a war-zone that nobody has been bothered to clean up or even acknowledge ever since _that bomb_ had been dropped right smack in the middle of the former capital and the world that had been left standing had both awed and despaired at the destructive force that had left nothing of the land but rubble, gas clouds and the shadows of children forever imprinted into the remaining stones.

The van pops every tire once, and the four days it takes her to cross through while Tobirama hallucinates about _Itama_ and _Kawarama_ and _Izuna_ and _Hashirama_ and _Touka_ in the back of her van in between bouts of vomiting his own lungs out (he doesn't – but just... barely), she almost loses her professionalism and her meagre breakfast herself (she can't quite get over the two-headed pig that comes their way, or the blind girl that she thinks is dead until the body _wriggles_ away from the road with noises that should be demonic).

They reach the capital on the third day and Sakura is not a believer, but the man who has taken to, at the very least, shoulder what he can of this country and act as its representative to the outside world is and it doesn't cost her a thing to sit down and pray while the van airs out behind her and Tobirama's groaning quiets.

On the fourth day he is lucid and she doesn't dare ask about any of the names that have passed his lips in agonizing moans when they make it across the border and into Tsuchi no Kuni. Harrowed as she is herself, it is no hardship to stop the van for an entire day when they've made it up the first mountain-range and simply remain there.

Tobirama doesn't ask why her hands shake, or why she is about as pale as he is despite the fact that she is not sick. He doesn’t ask why she looks like she’s seen a ghost, or like she hasn’t slept (she _hasn’t_ ). Or why, when she takes her first bite of food, she promptly wakes to vomit it out again three hours later when she’s already lain down to rest up. Taking him with her might have been the best idea she has ever had in her life; he’s so discreet – he doesn’t even ask why working her body through her Sun Salutations is more of a chore that day than it usually would be (bless his beautiful hide).

And when night falls and the stars come out, he merely sits down at her side on the roof of the van and looks, and simply doesn’t ask.

 

 


	9. Tsuchi no Kuni I

 

+++

 

Taking him with her might just have been one of the worst decisions she has made in her whole life. And there have been a lot of those so she knows what she's talking about. He’s simply way too freaking clever for her to be able to keep her secrets to herself for any longer than she already has managed to.

That she _has_ managed at all is a miracle probably owed to the fact that Suna had swallowed them up whole with its land-mines and green-houses and Pouched Rats. Tsuchi no Kuni is sweltering where Kaze no Kuni had been hot in a dry kind of way. But the mountains collect the cloudfulls of water within their range and once a day it pours heavy enough to lose sight of the road.

And Sakura doesn’t want to undress.

Tobirama has switched out most of his mummy-attire for shorter sleeves (although he seems unwilling to wear short trousers) and an old flannel-shirt that he dons or sheds according to the time of the day and the temperature of their current surroundings. There’s a black-and-white patch of some obscure band sewn into its left shoulder and she wonders, whenever she sees it, who they are and whether Tobirama actually knows them (she doesn’t ask when she spies the name _Hashirama_ written onto the label in the neck).

He gives her looks when he thinks she’s not paying attention; eyes carefully tracing the paths she can feel her sweat create down her neck and her cheeks and it’s so much worse under her attire because she feels _bathed_ in her own perspiration. The sensation is annoying for half a day before she gets used to it. Her smell is another thing (she remedies this by standing in the down-pour every second day, fully dressed and, consequently, fully drenched and the van smells musty for hours afterwards, but at least nothing much can be said about her stench).

They meet cow and sheep and a family of foxes that passes by their van one day early in the morning when they have just moved through their last round of Sun Salutations (they’re certain the sun is up there, somewhere, behind the clouds) but otherwise have only each other as company. Given that they can talk about anything and everything aside from road-related topics, while simultaneously _not talk_ about what lurks just beneath the surface, she finds herself lulled into what she soon realizes counts as a false sense of security.

He laughs at her dry remarks and beams at her with something like beauty when she sings him a folk song from back home that he promptly responds to with a sailor’s jaunt a friend of his had taught him a few years ago – it’s raunchy and not meant for civilized company but she falls into the refrain when the tune is easy enough to catch on to and she feels safe for the most part.

And then she runs out of clothing.

 

 


	10. Tsuchi no Kuni II

 

+++

 

 

Given her most recent habit of showering while fully dressed to stave off the unpleasantness of smelling like she's been driving around in the most sweltering temperatures while dressed as if going seal-hunting, he is surprised that she is even still in possession of dry underclothing.

As it turns out, one week into their entry into Tsuchi no Kuni, that is all she has left. He doesn’t want to ask – he _doesn’t_ – but… She also has nothing more to wear; and he is unprepared to deal with the situation.

Which is why, of course, he sticks his foot in his mouth (social interaction is… well it’s not his forte) and she evicts herself from the van for a whole day.

She is _gone_ when he comes back from his short walk to have an angry cigarette and while the van is still _there_ , sitting annoyingly innocently beside the road they’ve been travelling down for he doesn’t know how long (the map says they’re about half a day away from a small town; he doubts civilization will actually do them any good, with how they are currently) and he realizes… that he is even less prepared for this.

Solitude, where he has been wont to seek it before, feels stifling.

There is barely anything to see around him other than rocks and clouds and moss, interspersed with flowers that he cannot be bothered to name right now and the silence is loud with her absence.

He doesn’t know how long he just stands and… loses focus against the mountainous backdrop.It’s only when his eyes fall on their small gas-cooker peeking out from under her seat that he slowly sets into motion, limbs feeling heavy and reluctant. He parks the van anew, manoeuvring it further from the road with the boot opening towards the vastness of the canyons to the right of the road. He spans their tarpaulin next, covering the space between the open back doors and congratulates himself silently on a make-shift-tent well done.

Rifling through her clothing feels like an invasion of privacy but he swallows around his discomfort and goes for it, hanging up the shirts on an improvised clothing line between the doors before he fiddles for the gas-cooker and passes it below the garments.

When she comes back the next morning he is smoking his first cigarette of the day, egging his coffee on over the decrepit fire he’s started. Because he’s still passing the gas-cooker under her clothing, feeling for the damp spots of her dark trousers and turning them over as he needs to.

He doesn’t acknowledge her outright when she comes closer, feeling the folded shirts he has dried yesterday, before she steps up _close_ behind him. He has barely turned around to pay her attention, when her weight settles against his back. There are no words as her arms wind around him in a slightly awkward embrace – or when he reaches up to pass his thumb over her bare, scarred forearms.

 

 


End file.
